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Problem: A flimsy, saddle-stapled paper script in the hands of a nine-year-old thespian, already showing extreme signs of wear after only two rehearsals and without ever seeing the ravages lurking at the bottom of a backpack.

Solution: Adding a hard cover (stolen from a book on hand) to provide increased support and durability.

Maybe these reinforcements will help the script last at least a few weeks of heavy use, or perhaps even until performance time?

This whole project took about 15 minutes, making it longer to describe than to do. And the best part? The spine still suggests something about an important element in drama (apologies to Hans-Herbert Kögler).

When you open the box for your brand-new Kindle Fire, you’ll find the hottest 7-inch tablet to hit the market, a power adapter, and a “Quick Start Guide” that tells you how to turn it on. But to really take advantage of all the content and features the device has to offer, you’ll need a little more. Kindle Fire: Out of the Box gets you up and running beyond the first “Slide to unlock” screen to unlock all of your media from the cloud in the palm of your hand.
Whether your media library lives in Amazon Cloud Drive or on your device, the Fire gives you immediate access to all of it, wherever you are, as long as you know where to find it and how to consume it. With Kindle Fire: Out of the Box, you’ll jump right in to reading full-color magazines, newspapers, newly enhanced ebooks, and your own personal documents. Quickly download music from your Amazon Cloud Drive or new music from the Amazon MP3 store to listen offline, and get instant, unlimited access to streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows. And go beyond your own media to experience integrated email, games, Android apps from the Amazon App Store, and ultra-fast web browsing with the revolutionary, cloud-accelerated Silk browser.

This intuitive, easy-to-follow ebook opens the world of possibilities made possible by the Kindle Fire, right out of the box.

Everyone is calling Amazon’s Cloud Reader primarily a play to get in-app purchases on the iPad, but it’s much more than that. It means ubiquity of the Kindle platform across any new device that comes along, without requiring any additional app development. Amazon’s going to win the battle for the ebook space by being everywhere. (More …)

Though it’s a little hard to believe, Jeff Potter pointed out to me that today marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of his book, Cooking for Geeks (which I edited). To commemorate the occasion, I’ll be running a contest throughout the day, based on BookScan data I’ve collected for the past 52 weeks. The questions will involve demographic details of point-of-sale purchases of the book in the United States, not the book’s content. For example, which geographic region bought the most copies of the book? Urban or rural? Did your city buy more copies than mine?

Because it’s not as fun to see everyone’s answers in the comments, I’m going to conduct the contest on Twitter, though I’ll use this post for the questions, because it gives me a little more room to breathe. Here’s how it will work: for each question I ask (in a tweet) the first person to follow me on Twitter (so I can DM you) and reply (on Twitter, not on this post) with the correct answer gets a free copy of the book. Make sense?

The biggest source of traffic (by far) to my humble blog has been the expanded version of my DIY Bookbinding article, which originally appeared in Make magazine, Volume 5. If you’ve seen it here before, I hope you’ve found it useful. Given its popularity, I decided it was time to finish what I’d always had in mind for it: to make it look nice in InDesign and distribute it as an ebook. My employer thought it was a good idea too, and now my baby is all growed up. It is finally available at a reasonable price as a pretty 32-page PDF, an intentionally convenient length (32 pages is an even signature) suitable for printing and binding on your own.

I’m actually not sure if I’m going to keep the content up on this site forever, because I like the finished ebook so much, but I also want people to use it, even if they don’t want to pay for it. I’m going to put off that decision indefinitely, but in the meantime, the same content lives here on my blog. If you want a more professional-looking version, something to print and bind yourself, or just a way to show me how much you’ve enjoyed it, you can drop five bucks in the tip jar and download away.

Over Thanksgiving, my family made a little getaway to Stowe in Vermont. I expected the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour (and samples) to be a highlight, but I didn’t count on the fabulous candy-cane-making demo at Laughing Moon Chocolates. What follows is by no means a how-to (in fact, it’s quite dangerous, so please don’t try this at home), but it should serve as interesting documentation. Here’s how they did it.

My wife is a running coach. Because I get her services for free, I thought I’d give something back by creating something that might make her job a little easier for her work with paying clients. One of the tools she uses is as useful to her as it is cumbersome to handle. It’s a collection of running data that begins with men’s world record times at the following distances: